Story formats for data

Financial Times, in an effort to streamline a part of the data journalism process, developed templates for data stories. They call it the Story Playbook: The Playbook is also an important driver of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How Much the Everyday Changes When You Have Kids

I compared time use for those with children under 18 against those without. Here’s where the minutes go. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Four

Got a chuckle out of me: Me explaining why standardizing your variables is important: pic.twitter.com/mQKj0nEJ0G— Chelsea Parlett Pelleriti (@ChelseaParlett) June 12, 2019 | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Choosing Your Charts (The Process #44)

Assuming you have a dataset in hand, how do you decide what visualization method to use? | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Readability of privacy policies for big tech companies

For The New York Times, Kevin Litman-Navarro plotted the length and readability of privacy policies for large companies: To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analyzed the length and r… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Runway ML makes machine learning easier to use for creators

Machine learning can feel like a foreign concept only useful to those with access to big machines. Runway ML aims to make machine learning easier to use for a wider audience, specifically for creat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Myth of the impartial machine

In its inaugural issue, Parametric Press describes how bias can easily come about when working with data: Even big data are susceptible to non-sampling errors. A study by researchers at Google foun… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Salesforce to acquire Tableau

From Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky: In 2003, Tableau set out to pioneer self-service analytics with an intuitive analytics platform that would empower people of any skill level to work with data. Our c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Increasing ocean temperatures, decreasing ice

For National Geographic, Kennedy Elliot made a series of heatmaps that show the relative shifts in the ocean: The oceans don’t just soak up excess heat from the atmosphere; they also absorb e… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Simulation of fan emotions during a basketball game

During a game, the range of emotions can vary widely across a crowd. Will Hipson, making use of some emotion dynamics, simulated how that range can change through a game: What I’m striving to simul… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Search through 3m nonprofit tax records

ProPublica just released a search tool for nonprofit tax records: The possibilities are nearly limitless. You can search for the names or addresses of independent contractors that made more than $1… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Missing the Trees for the Forest (The Process #43)

Don’t step so far away from the data that you miss the details that provide meaning to the overviews. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Big storm on the way. Oh wait, no, it’s a cloud of ladybugs

Apparently ladybugs migrate this time of year, and it’s enough to show up on the radar as a giant rain cloud. Yeah. The large echo showing up on SoCal radar this evening is not precipitation,… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

The role of cartography in early global explorations

For Lapham’s Quarterly, Elizabeth Della Zazzera turns back the clock to maps used for navigation, starting with the 1300s and through 1720: From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Europ… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

What to expect data visualization job interviews

Krist Wongsuphasawat, who recently interviewed for a healthy helping of visualization jobs, outlines the questions asked and the general flow of things. [T]here are some sessions that your data vis… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Mapping Bob Ross

Fathom Information Design recently made tools to find patterns in documents of text. They applied their tools to Bob Ross: Using custom tools we’ve built to understand large document sets, we… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Map of the most popular people replacing the cities they lived in

For The Pudding, Matt Daniels and Russell Goldenberg used Wikipedia pageviews to replace city names with each city’s most popular resident: Person/city associations were based on the thousand… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Jeopardy! winners making chart jokes

James Holzhauer is on a record-breaking Jeopardy! win streak. It’s not so much for the number of wins in a row — an impressive 30 so far — but for how much he wins per game. He… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Resources, May 2019 Roundup (The Process #42)

Every month I collect links to visualization tools and resources. Here’s the good stuff for May 2019. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Charts as a medium for expression

Christine Sun Kim, a deaf artist known for her work visualizing and creating experiences around sound, recently took up charts as a medium. From Anna Furman for The New York Times Style Magazine: C… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Why some Asian accents swap Ls and Rs

Vox delves into why Ls and Rs often get replaced by Asian speakers using English as a second language. Some sounds aren’t prevalent in other languages, and it’s not the same across all … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Getting to zero coal in Britain

For The Guardian, Niko Kommenda shows the decrease in coal usage for power since 2012. As of this writing, it’s been just under 11 straight days with 0% of power generated by burning coal. Th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Rise of the summer sequel

For The New York Times, Keith Collins shows the growing popularity of summer sequels among the big movie studios. If there is money to be made, they will come. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Setting Visualization Expectations to Avoid Audience Confusion (The Process #41)

People misinterpret charts all of the time, because they go in with the wrong expectations before they even fully interpret what a chart is about. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Counting and illustrating Game of Thrones deaths

Shelly Tan, for The Washington Post, has been counting on-screen deaths in Game of Thrones over the past few years. As the season ended, Tan described her process in an entertaining Twitter thread:… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Cost of College

We know that more education usually equals more income, but as the cost of education continues to rise, the challenge to earn a college degree also increases. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Using statistics for basketball efficiency

Ivana Seric is a data scientist for the Philadelphia 76ers who tries to improve player effectiveness by analyzing tracking data. Aki Ito for Bloomberg: I really want to see the relationship of winn… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

New abortion restrictions by state, since 2011

For FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Gus Wezerek categorized and mapped new abortion restrictions enacted by state legislatures from 2011 to 2019: The result is a complicated patchwork o… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Giorgia Lupi joins Pentagram

Giorgia Lupi, whose work exemplifies the use of data and visualization outside of analytic insights (think Dear Data), is now a partner at design consultancy Pentagram. For FastCompany, Mark Wilson… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Mapping politically polarized cities

Rachael Dottle, for FiveThirtyEight, looked for political differences in cities and ranked them, based on precinct voting margins for the 2016 election: To see just how politically segregated Ameri… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Game of Thrones viewer ratings by season

The last episode is coming. Some people don’t like how it’s ending, and the IMDB ratings seem to reflect this. For The Upshot, Josh Katz and K.K. Rebecca Lai charted the changes over th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Inverted world map

Frans Block wondered what the world would look like if water and land were flipped. The deepest spots in the ocean become the highest mountains and the highest mountains become the deepest part of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Making Comparisons Easier When Presenting Data (The Process #40)

Visualization is all about making comparisons. If you have nothing to compare to, then the chart fails. In this issue I describe some of the ways you can make your charts more comparable. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

More candidates and earlier

For Bloomberg, Lauren Leatherby and Paul Murray describe the heightened eagerness to enter the race for United States president. The stacked timelines, looking like squished bunches of Twizzlers, s… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Interactive explainer for how disease and ideas spread through a network

Kevin Simler uses interactive simulations to explain how things — ideas, disease, memes — spread through a network. It always looks like concentrated chaos to begin, but then the things… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Sprawlball, an in-depth look into the evolution of modern basketball

If you’ve seen a basketball shot chart in the past few years, it was probably made or inspired by the work of Kirk Goldsberry. Coming from a cartography and data visualization background, Gol… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Pitch speed distribution, a decrease with age

Pitch speed starts to decrease with a baseball player’s age at some point. This makes sense. That’s why athletes retire. The Statcast pitch distributions show when this happens for indi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Growing similarity in global diet

Diet around the world is growing more similar. National Geographic charted estimates of the similarity over time: People increasingly eat the same types of food. They now get more calories from whe… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Line Chart Baselines Do Not Have to Start at Zero (The Process #39)

There was renewed interest in — gasp — truncated axes this week, a never-ending debate about whether starting axes at non-zero is misleading. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How the 2020 Census will be different

Ted Mellnik and Reuben Fischer-Baum for The Washington Post describe the changes to the 2020 Census, which will lean more heavily on technology: The coming census also will break with history with … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Amount of fish to raise a big fish

Raising living things requires resources. In the case of fish, it requires more fish so that another can grow larger. Artists Chow and Lin calculated how much. The surrounding small fish are requir… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Remixing the grocery receipt with data visualization

In prototyping mode, Susie Lu incorporated visualization into the common receipt from the grocery store. It gives a price breakdown for money spent on an actual receipt-sized paper using the same t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Game of Thrones books versus television series

I think I started watching Game of Thrones around the fourth season (my wife gave me the cliffs notes), so I’ve missed a bunch, but I’ve seen enough now where I have to know what happen… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Chart chooser based on data format

There are many chart types to choose from, which is great, because there’s always something to fit your needs. But sometimes the variety can be daunting, because it can feel like there are to… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Axis Labels, Better Than Defaults (The Process #38)

In this guide, I look maybe a little too closely at how to adjust axis labels for more readable charts. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How many Skittles packs before finding identical ones?

A note on a pack of Skittles reads, “No two rainbows are the same. Neither are two packs of Skittles. Enjoy an odd mix.” Of course that can’t possibly be right, because there are … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How You Will Die (2016)

So far we’ve seen when you will die and how other people tend to die. Now let’s put the two together to see how and when you will die, given your sex, race, and age. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Job Switching by Age

Looking at the 100 most common jobs people switched to, a timeline comes into view when we adjust the relative switch rates by age. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago